The Notion of “Rights” and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia

Abstract

This article attempts to undertake a reading of “gender” as it operates in Bolivia’s juridical history, in order to propose some issues of debate that I consider pertinent to any discussion of the “rights of indigenous peoples” and their close ties, at least as I see them, to “the rights of women” (whether indigenous, cholas, birlochas, or refi nadas).1 First I focus on the masculine and lettered aspects of the juridical process that has produced the documents known as the Laws of the Republic. In Europe both the law and the modern historical formation of what is known as “public space” are anchored in the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, whereby the rebirth of the human being was implicitly imagined as a masculine Universal Subject, who was by nature a bearer of “rights.” Up to now the notion of “human rights” means nothing more than what were known as “the rights of man” (droits de l’homme) in the eighteenth century. Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have noted this confl ation, writing of a “phallogocentric” version of the modern Subject, the enlightened heterosexual individual.2 This representation of the modern individual has been inscribed in European history and imposed on the rest of the world